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So, I look over the list of things that I hypothesize could have split me, and I think, what a bunch of first world problems. I mean, the only one that sounds like it rationally could have done much damage is the idea that I might have been raped, and I have no memory of the actual event and don’t have any reason to think that it happened other than a fear and a change in my attitudes towards one gender. I hear on the news that people are having to live in war zones and other people are getting shot at by the cops. I really don’t have anything to complain about, comparitively, although it would be really nice to live in a world where what happened to me was on the outside edge of bad and undesirable.
July 11th, 2016 at 11:25 am
There’s probably a name for the cognitive fallacy in this line of thinking, but I am both not well versed in the literature on such things, nor am I skilled at recalling names.
Comparing your objective experience to other’s objective experience then attempting to find a “damaging” event is a fallacy, because the event only had to be bad enough TO YOU, subjectively. It doesn’t matter if it was indeed a “first-world problem”, because it was subjectively a large enough strain to cause “damage” or “permanent” mind scape alteration. Those other events that objectively are worse and could possibly cause your mind to be damaged, but equal objective experiences can have vastly different subjective cognitive effects.